Determined Mavericks

“I stuck a camera in the middle of the street and just shot people.”

Reflecting on his origins as a film maker to the Vancouver movie critic and journalist David Spaner, the African-American filmmaker Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, To Sleep with Anger) taps the very heart of the so-called “independent” movie-making spirit. Indeed, it is the spirit that gives Spaner’s book on the history of non-studio filmmaking its title—Shoot It! Hollywood Inc. and the Rising of Independent Film—and that links Burnett with such other noteworthy do-it-yourself types as Orson Welles, Dennis Hopper, John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Susan Seidelman, Miranda July, Nicole Holofcener and Catherine Breillat.

Burnett has not made a feature in quite some time. His fiercely independent...